As part of the Chinese Whispers series from 2003, Little Cinderellas by dependably
engaging radio dramatist Hattie Naylor was interesting and unsettling. It starred Samantha Spiro as a single British
woman who goes to China to adopt a baby girl.
The story focuses on the process she has to go through in order to be
cleared for adoption (including icy disdain from the case worker, who is
British-Iranian and is taking her family back to Iran), and the story of the
girl’s mother, who has to give her up after having had her second baby taken to
the orphanage by its father. An African
woman at the airport accuses the protagonist of buying the baby; a British
woman at the airport says, “Is she yours?”
“Yes, she’s mine.” “Your man was
from the East?” “Yes, her father was
Chinese.” At some point in the future,
when the girl is 6, she complains to her mother about being different and not
wanting to be “yellow.” It was
well-written, and it offered no easy answers. It was directed by Janet Whittaker.
When I first heard Country
Life by Shelagh Delaney quite early in my audio drama listening career, I
thought it was amazing. I didn’t realize
that Delaney had a playwriting career stretching back to the ‘60s with the
gamechanging A Taste of Honey. By the time Whoopi Goldberg’s Country Life came along, I was that much more
disappointed with what I thought was a rather poor piece of work, knowing
Delaney’s legacy. I’m glad to say that
her trio of plays, Sweetly Sings the
Donkey, Tell Me a Film, and Baloney
Said Salome, shot right back to the top.
Although they follow a group of girls from their pre-teens into old age,
I don’t think you need to listen to them in sequence to enjoy them. I believe Sweetly Sings the Donkey at least started life as a stage play, but
I’m not sure about its sequels.
In the first story, Sweetly
Sings the Donkey from 2000, four northern girls convalesce in a home run by
nuns in Blackpool in the late 1940s. One
of them, Lilian, is a know-it-all and always getting in trouble. She borrows The Communist Manifesto from the cook, and it gets burned by the
nuns. Vivian is the stuck-up fantasist
who keeps telling everyone about all the stuff her family owns. The nuns range from jolly but stupid to
reasonably down-to-earth (for nuns).
Nina is the only girl who has her own room, apparently because she cries
in her sleep, and she doesn’t know why.
Lilian runs away, plays with developmentally disabled children from
another home on the beach, chases after a runaway donkey, and meets up with a
demobbed man who gives her chocolate. It
isn’t what you think; he isn’t a pervert.
They have quite sensible conversations before Lilian gets returned to
the home. It made good use of seaside
sound effects.
Tell Me a Film, originally
from 2002, features the girls, all grown up now, and played by Eileen O’Brien,
Barbara Martin, Kate Purcell, and Susan Twist.
Nina, Vivian, Lilian and Barbara are all grown up—in fact, middle-aged. They
reunite for a holiday together in Blackpool to revisit their misspent
youths. The world has changed a lot
since they were recuperating. Nina is
dying from cancer; Vivian has had a career as a thief and fraudster and has
just gotten out of jail; Barbara became a nun but has left the convent. It’s Delaney; it’s well-written. Baloney
Said Salome from 2004 is the final play and is genuinely sad as it took the
four characters to the end of their lives (Nina’s anyway). Vivian, true to her character, kept
ransacking Nina’s house for her will as she wanted to know who she was leaving
the house to. The title refers to the
fact that Nina always wanted to be a belly-dancer and the only belly-dancing
she knew was this schoolyard rhyme. The
latter two plays were directed by Polly Thomas.
